Picasso, Kepler, and the Benefits of Being an Expert Generalist :: Articles :: 99U: “One thing that separates the great innovators from everyone else is that they seem to know a lot about a wide variety of topics. They are expert generalists. Their wide knowledge base supports their creativity. As it turns out, there are two personality traits that are key for expert generalists: Openness to Experience and Need for Cognition. Openness to Experience is one of the Big Five personality characteristics identified by psychologists. The Big Five are the characteristics that reflect the biggest differences between people in the way they act. Openness to Experience is the degree to which a person is willing to consider new ideas and opportunities. Some people enjoy the prospect of doing something new and thinking about new things. Other people prefer to stick with familiar ideas and activities. As you might expect, high levels of Openness to Experience can sometimes be related to creativity. After all, being creative requires doing something that has not been done before. If you are not willing to do something new, then it’s hard to be creative.”

One thing that separates the great innovators from everyone else is that they seem to know a lot about a wide variety of topics. They are expert generalists. Their wide knowledge base supports their creativity.

As it turns out, there are two personality traits that are key for expert generalists: Openness to Experience and Need for Cognition.

Openness to Experience is one of the Big Five personality characteristics identified by psychologists. The Big Five are the characteristics that reflect the biggest differences between people in the way they act. Openness to Experience is the degree to which a person is willing to consider new ideas and opportunities. Some people enjoy the prospect of doing something new and thinking about new things. Other people prefer to stick with familiar ideas and activities.

As you might expect, high levels of Openness to Experience can sometimes be related to creativity. After all, being creative requires doing something that has not been done before. If you are not willing to do something new, then it’s hard to be creative.

“Debt is the most insidious of civic plagues, far more so than even excessive taxing and extreme spending. That’s because debt is less obvious and more abstract. Spend a dollar, and you know it’s gone. Tax a dollar, and you’re aware it’s taken. Go in debt for a dollar, and it’s out of sight, out of mind… “The wicked borrows and does not pay back,” wrote the psalmist.”

In allowing the government to maintain a standing army and police force, we are also agreeing to transfer to the state the duty and immense power of defending us from being attacked in the first place. This is not only a matter of practicality, it’s the only method anyone’s come up with to prevent the Hobbesian war of all against all.

As the founders knew, however, the power we grant the state to defend us can easily be turned against us. “The means of defence against foreign danger,” Madison wrote, “have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” Going back even farther, this was why the supporters of republican government stuck the long knives into Julius Caesar. In “crossing the Rubicon,” he violated the law by bringing the Roman army into Italy. This effectively turned the means of protecting the republic into the tool for establishing imperial rule.

I’ve seen this premise mocked mercilessly in the media recently with a sneering “really?!? You really think you need guns to keep the government away? You think there’s going to be another revolution?”. (A pet peeve of mine. Thinking that the remorseless repetition of the word really? substitutes for cogent argument. This was reinforced under a movie director that did this cluelessly and constantly for weeks. No logical support or counter argument, just “really? really?, REALLY?“)

The intention is pretty clear: whether consciously or not, Constitutional opponents seek to minimize and ridicule 2nd Amendment supporters into giving up a fundamental right in exchange for illusory (and proven-false) security. But saying that something is unlikely is not the same thing as saying that it is impossible. I don’t believe it’s likely that we’d have to exercise our 2nd Amendment rights against the government, but I am unwilling to be coerced by that same government into making those Rights, won by others through trial and bloodshed, into illegal acts. Especially in light of history.

Here’s the point: if you can so easily use reactionary, crisis-based emotionalism to remove or weaken a single Right that has been protected in the Bill of Rights then someone else can use the same template to remove a different one. Those rights are there for a purpose and by common agreement. They are the rules of the game and it is unacceptable for one side to change the rules when they do not like the conditions. There are ways (also within the rules) of changing, amending, and abolishing those rights and if the true owners of our republic (citizens) want to unburden ourselves of our protections and do away with the Fifth Amendment (due process), the First (freedom of speech), the 6th (right to a trial by jury) or the 2nd (right to bear arms), then we use the mechanisms within the rulebook (the Constitution) to change them. That’s the deal. Unilateralism isn’t a legitimate vehicle of constitutional modification, and mockery does not qualify as logical support.

For many of us, it is not about 10 vs 17 round magazines, or folding stocks, or bayonet mounts, or even Sandy Hill. We are putting aside emotion and playing the Long Game. It is about the rules that we have agreed to as a society. Yes, those rules can sometimes be twisted and manipulated by madmen to tragic ends, but we refuse to lose sight of the protections they ultimately provide. In the end, the citizens who are standing strong on the 2nd Amendment are simply standing strong for all citizens. And the entirety of the Bill of Rights.

After a mass shooting, gun controllers push the policies they’ve always supported as if they were a logical response to that particular example of senseless violence. When skeptics say it is hard to see how the proposed measures could have prevented that attack, gun controllers (if they are honest) say that’s beside the point, because the real goal is not preventing the rare mass shootings that get all the attention but curtailing more common forms of gun violence. If so, the horrible event that supposedly makes new legislation urgently necessary does not in fact strengthen the case for that legislation one iota. If the proposed policy was a good idea before the attack, it remains a good idea; if it was a bad idea, the emotionally compelling but logically irrelevant deaths of innocents do not make it suddenly sensible.

“It occurred to me, after the Sandy Hook murders, that blaming guns is a secular substitute for blaming the devil. People find it too challenging to figure out why a human being would do this terrible thing and they latch on to the idea that the gun made it happen. Suicide presents a similar challenge, and one way to fathom it is to say: It was the gun. Isn’t it like saying the devil made him do it? The gun/the devil is a great go-to answer, freeing you from wracking your brain about the workings of the human mind.”

January 15, 2013

It’s official! I’ve been hired to build a rather cool and impressive object. It’s going to take a bit of time and design work, but the availability of the CNC machine at TechShop is going to be invaluable. It’s not an actual working… thing (that would be illegal), but it’s certainly going to look the part.